What Does Pride Have to Do with Embodying Tradition? | Pride Invocation
“Our faith is full of so many more imaginative possibilities when we see tradition as an opportunity to play together with our ancestors than as a burden we have been tasked to carry.”
SueAnn Shiah
This Pride, we are exploring the intersection of worship, music, and what it looks like for us as LGBTQ+ Christians to Play It Proud. This year’s theme emphasizes our joy in our community, in our communal worship of the Divine, in our gratitude for unconditional love, and in our collective expression of who we fully and freely are. Today, Musician, Filmmaker, Writer, and Emerging Theologian, SueAnn Shiah, wraps up our Pride Month Invocation series by having us take a look at tradition and how it can be a conversation with our ancestors instead of a burden to carry.
Pride celebrations, as we know them today, go back to the Stonewall Riots which began on June 28, 1969 and continued for several days after. The Riots were sparked by a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a place where members of the LGBTQ community gathered in Greenwich Village in New York City. A year after the initial incident, LGBTQ people came together and marched through NYC to commemorate, with banners and signs protesting for the fair, just, and equal treatment of the queer community, with simultaneous marches held in solidarity in Chicago and Los Angeles—this was the precursor to what we know as Pride celebrations and Pride month today.
The traditions of the church are not so different. When we look at the Liturgical calendar, we celebrate Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, and Pentecost every year too. We were not present when these things happened 2000 years ago, but through the power of remembrance, we keep those traditions of memory alive to today. In my first album, a Liturgy for the Perseverance of the Saints (available on Bandcamp, YouTube, Apple Music, Spotify etc.), I tried my hand at reimagining old hymns in a new way for this era. I took a bunch of songs ranging from 100 to 800 years old and I recorded them. I kept the same words and melodies, but I played them and sang them differently than how I was hearing people at my church sing them or other musicians.
My favorite song on the album is “Praise to the Lord the Almighty” (1680) which was written by a German Reformed Calvinist theologian and writer, Joachim Neander. During his time, he got into theological arguments and conflicts with his local pastor, but things got so bad he stopped showing up to communion. Instead, he was banished and lived for months in a cave in the mountains. It was this time in nature that hymnologists think inspired much of the nature imagery found in his hymns—and for me, it brought to life the last verse of my favorite hymn on the album, consequently also the last song on the record. I felt his longing to return to church community from his isolated worship in nature like I felt my own after I had to leave my church too— “Let the Amen sound from His people again, Gladly for aye we adore Him!”
Tradition is not about always doing things exactly the same way every year or in every community we are a part of. It is about keeping the thing alive by passing it down, a thread that connects people throughout time and space by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Our faith is full of so many more imaginative possibilities when we see tradition as an opportunity to play together with our ancestors than as a burden we have been tasked to carry.
What are worship traditions that have fed you?
How have you made them your own and kept them alive today?
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